Abstract

The Little house in the big woods (1932) and the Little house on the prairie (1935) are part of a series of children's books written by Laura Ingalls Wilder to document her family's journeys through different territories in America, trying to find a home. Little house on the prairie involves the family's move into the famed "Indian Territory" which becomes a contested space in postcolonial terms, involving the expected encounter with the indigenous "other". However, the traditional postcolonial spaces are not the only contested spaces in these books. Widening my analysis to include the nonhuman "other" in different forms, I use a spatial analysis within an ecocritical framework to show how wild and domestic spaces are held in balance through the narrative in a number of ways. These spaces serve as a basis for the construction of the child's sense of self and belonging.